Cedar Point man makes guitars out of scrap

Published: Tuesday, June 17, 2014 at 02:29 PM.

Some of his customers pay a bit more for a custom design. One instrument in his shop sported the initials of one customer as the body of a bass.

Though most of Siebold’s business is conducted through his website at krappyguitars.com, he also sells at the Salty Air Market off on N.C. 24 in Cedar Point as well.

There, casual musicians can pick up a one-string guitar for the fun of it.

“It’s for anywhere from young kids who just want to noodle around or somebody who just wants to hang something cute on their wall to some grandma, grandpa who always wanted to play the guitar but never had the time or desire to practice,” he said. “Well you can pick out melodies,” Siebold said, as he plucked the beginning of “Happy Birthday” on a single-string. “Just single note stuff … This is just for absolute fun … This is for joy.”

He also makes instruments such as the electric upright bass, which is convenient for its compact size compared to the very large upright bass.

“This can fit in a very small space and it has the same exact tones available as if you were playing a regular bass,” he said.

The touch-style instruments come in handy for musicians who no longer have the use of both hands; Siebold had a customer who had Parkinson’s disease and couldn’t play a normal guitar anymore because it required both hands, but he only had use of one.

“Krapmeister” Kevin Siebold stood on a ladder in his garage sporting his work clothes — shorts and a faded T-shirt — proudly showing off scraps of wood.

Some of it beautiful but more of it flawed with knots, warps and other scars. Siebold, the founder and self-titled Krapmeister of Krappy Guitars, knows the history of most of the scraps of wood he uses to make his musical instruments.

With his business, Siebold recycles other people’s trash into musicians’ treasure: affordable and unique guitars.

The materials used to make a Krappy Guitar are usually throw-away items salvaged from cabinet stores and guitar manufacturers, scraps found in dumpster dives and some donations from people who have no need for construction site remnants or who have had a tree fall in their yard. Siebold also buys discounted wood — which has been labeled “knotty” and “warped,” according to Siebold — from places such as World Timber in Hubert.

“My instruments are weird, quirky and built from questionable and lousy materials,” Siebold said, pointing at a guitar with a piece of cherry wood riddled with worm holes.

Siebold’s products range in price from $20 to $800, starting with one-string pieces to complex, wide- and double-neck electric guitars, such as a 12-string touch-style. He also creates basses, including electric upright basses.

Though the instruments are affectionately dubbed “krappy,” the material doesn’t affect the sound. Beyond his simple one-string guitars, all of Siebold’s instruments are electric, and electric guitars get their sound from the metal pickup.

“It doesn’t affect the sound at all,” he said. “That’s the beauty of electric instruments.”

His instruments also serve musicians for whom cost is a factor, something he said is common just by virtue of being a musician.

Because Siebold makes his instruments from cheap — and sometimes free — materials, he can help those musicians out.

“The appeal of my guitars is a comparable one from a reputable manufacturer goes from $2,000 to $3,800,” he said, pointing to a touch-style guitar. He charges approximately $800 for his.

Siebold said musicians can learn and “cut their teeth on my instrument,” to decide if they want to continue playing it or discover if they can master it. If the answer is yes, he said they can graduate to the more expensive models from “a reputable” manufacturer.

But Siebold said his efforts to use recycled materials don’t come from a “tree-hugging” attitude.

Some of his customers pay a bit more for a custom design. One instrument in his shop sported the initials of one customer as the body of a bass.

Though most of Siebold’s business is conducted through his website at krappyguitars.com, he also sells at the Salty Air Market off on N.C. 24 in Cedar Point as well.

There, casual musicians can pick up a one-string guitar for the fun of it.

“It’s for anywhere from young kids who just want to noodle around or somebody who just wants to hang something cute on their wall to some grandma, grandpa who always wanted to play the guitar but never had the time or desire to practice,” he said. “Well you can pick out melodies,” Siebold said, as he plucked the beginning of “Happy Birthday” on a single-string. “Just single note stuff … This is just for absolute fun … This is for joy.”

He also makes instruments such as the electric upright bass, which is convenient for its compact size compared to the very large upright bass.

“This can fit in a very small space and it has the same exact tones available as if you were playing a regular bass,” he said.

The touch-style instruments come in handy for musicians who no longer have the use of both hands; Siebold had a customer who had Parkinson’s disease and couldn’t play a normal guitar anymore because it required both hands, but he only had use of one.

Siebold also includes in his package with instruments a history of the materials used.

For example, one certificate talks about “wormy-ass cherry and walnut” that was left in a loft for years.

Siebold is passionate about both producing music and producing the instruments on which musicians make them.

“There’s always a product at the end of it; and whatever the product is, whether it comes out great and whether it comes out lousy, it’s your produce, and it’s something tangible,” he said. “It’s different from music where if I were to play a note, whether the note is good or bad, once it passes your ear as a listener … that’s it.”

Siebold jokes that Krappy Guitars was “born out of poverty,” because, as a musician, he wanted a touch-style guitar on which to practice his craft.

At the time, in 1996, Siebold was playing in a jazz fusion band, the Roamin’ Gabriels, and teaching guitar lessons. However, the touch-style guitar he wanted cost approximately $2,000.

“At the time, I had a growing family and not a lot of money,” Siebold said.

So he ended up building an instrument to model the one he wanted, which has now gone through several evolutions. Siebold keeps making better and better instruments from the one he originally made. Presently, he plays a 14-string touch-style guitar, which at a moment’s notice he can whip out and play a complex jazz tune.

He uses a combination of skills to make his instruments: a little bit of shop education from high school, experience in manufacturing wheelchairs and what he calls “growing up with a pretty mechanical bent.”

In 2004, Siebold began the Krappy Guitars enterprise. When he and his family moved to Cedar Point from New Jersey in 2011, he continued his business, but also does some boat repair in the area.

Much of his traffic stays on the Internet. He ships his products all over the world, as far away as Russia and Australia. Siebold said he averages around seven products sold on average a month.

And the touch-style instruments can take him 24 hours — spread out over several weeks — to craft. The less complex instruments take eight to 12 hours. When building the one-string guitars, he builds a whole “slew” of them at the same time.

“There is some appeal to the fact that once this was a piece of lousy wood and real rough hewn, and then once it’s finished … people look at this and say, ‘Wow, you made a nice guitar,’” Siebold said.

Still, Siebold doesn’t take much credit for it: He either credits the wood itself or others before him who came up with the designs.